Shaping Client Services at Hartley & Avenue

I’ve been with the University just over four months and much of that time has been taken up getting to know my team and learning about the library. Staff and students alike will appreciate the number of different services offered here and my teams contribute to many of them. In the case of our enquiry services they deliver them directly, virtually in the form of email and the chat service and also physically across Hartley, the LRC and Avenue. My teams also help manage the study spaces, collect feedback and statistics and provide support to other areas, such as desk side training, collections and info skills sessions.

Although much of the work I’ve been doing so far hasn’t been that visible there has been one notable exception. Along with others in the service I’ve been preparing for the January exam period, learning lessons from feedback and experiences of May 2014 and as much as possible putting in place measures to mitigate or remove problems experienced last time.

Looking beyond this into Semester 2 I’ve got a great many strands to take forward, including developing the Webchat service, our desk services on Level 2 at Hartley and generally consolidating the Client Service and Support team. Inevitably I’ll be juggling the day to day tasks of managing a large team including recruitment, training and communication. We’ll also be preparing almost immediately for the next 24/7 period in April as well as looking forward to the pre-sessional intake of international students this year, a key task for everyone in the library but especially my teams over in the Language Resource Centre and Avenue Library.

Outside of work much of my spare time has been spent learning to climb at the local climbing wall and training for a 16 mile off road run that I completed in December. In a moment of madness I signed up for a marathon in February so for the next few weeks I’ll mainly be found running intervals in the gym or dodging the rain showers on the trails around the New Forest. I’m still not quite sure what I’ve let myself in for and as such all cake based contributions to the marathon training are welcome.

After my last blog post I was asked what maker and hack spaces were and I’m pleased to be able to point CILIP members towards the November 2014 edition of Update where you can read a co-authored feature on the development of these spaces in libraries. Alternatively you can read a slightly extended and revised introduction to the feature on my own blog.